Streaming: Steven Soderbergh’s Presence and the best haunted house films

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The director’s witty supernatural thriller joins Psycho, Hereditary, The Brutalist and more – films in which buildings are characters in their own right The first more-or-less horror movie in the lengthy, genre-skimming career of director Steven Soderbergh , Presence is a film about grief, trauma, familial dysfunction and abusive masculinity. But it’s also, to a significant and compelling extent, about property. Beginning with a family’s first viewing of a handsome Victorian home in an unidentified stretch of suburbia, the film never ventures outside its walls for the next 85 minutes, as the ensuing chills make us consider the merits of that purchase. Wittily and unnervingly shot from the perspective of the restless spirit roaming its halls, it’s a haunted house film in which much of the tension feels determined by the shape and flow and light and shade of the house itself. It’s a while since I’ve seen a film where I could quite so exactly draw the floor plan of its primary location,...
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Tell Me About It review – British Asian Gen Z drama bounces between crime and kitchen sink

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Two young women on a jaunt find themselves embroiled with drug gangsters in director Suman Hanif’s uneven feature

Here is a film set in the British-Pakistani community that focuses on two Gen Z girls on the cusp of adulthood: Halima (Nimrah S Zaman) and Amara (Ariya Larker). Halima is the daughter of an MP with plans to get tougher on drug-related crime, while Amara is just trying to get by despite a turbulent family life, with parents who seemingly can’t stand each other and a brother struggling to find his path in life and considering a job in a call centre. So far, so social-realist, but when Halima and Amara plan a weekend away, Amara gets kidnapped by accident by a goon working for a drug kingpin who, claiming “all brown girls look the same to me”, mistakes her for Halima.

The director, Suman Hanif, has said that Tell Me About It is aiming to hold a mirror up to represent the experiences of the British South Asian community; presumably this applies to the family dynamics and friendships more than the kidnap plot. It’s uneven stuff – the way that Hanif blends the contrasting elements of kitchen-sink realism, comedy and kidnap drama lands us somewhere in the same tonal zone of a TV programme like Hollyoaks.

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